Quotes from H. Beam Piper

Does the Convocation make the laws?" Erskyll asked. Hozhet was perplexed. "Make laws, Lord Proconsul? Oh, no. We have laws." There were planets, here and there through the Empire, where an attitude like that would have been distinctly beneficial; planets with elective parliaments, every member of which felt himself obligated to get as many laws enacted during his term of office as possible.

It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot of jobs, to keep a civilization running.

a thing isn't much good if it can't stand being made fun of.

Gresham's law, extended: Bad manners drive out good manners.

To argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futile as to administer medicine to the dead.

The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams; The hinges are rusty, they swing with tiny screams.

Everybody seems to have money, but the government is always broke. Deficit spending--and always the vital social services for which the government has to spend money. The most vital one, of course, is buying votes to keep the government in power. And it gets harder for the government to get anything done.

In a religious community, the village atheist keeps his doubts to himself.

they have a democracy, and they are letting the enemies of democracy shelter themselves behind democratic safeguards.

is devoted to civilization or anything else outside himself, and that's the mark of the barbarian.

The whole society is a slave hierarchy. Everybody curries favor with the echelon above, and keeps his eye on the echelon below to make sure he isn't being undercut. We have something not too unlike that, ourselves. Any organizational society is, in some ways, like a slave society.

The unrealistic beliefs of diplomats are what soldiers die of,

At the Long Island plant, no one was concerned about espionage—neither

Atrocity has a horrible facility for begetting atrocity.

Vengeance is a strange human motivation-- it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature!

Keep a government poor and weak and it's your servant; let it get rich and powerful and it's your master.

went across the more civilized Third

Great plagues from little microbes start.

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People have to learn to live with newly-discovered facts; if they don't, they die of them.

You show me ten men who cherish some religious doctrine or political ideology, and I'll show you nine men whose minds are utterly impervious to any factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, and who regard the producer of such evidence as a criminal who ought to be suppressed.

I suppose there's always a place for Judas, at any table." *

if Rand was equal to Old

fratricidally